This makes two interminable shipboard romances. First, Titanic, that cinematic slog-fest that unfortunately boosted the careers of James Cameron and Celine Dion. Now, Anything Goes, the 80-year-old Broadway musical that seems to go on almost that long at the Welk Resort Theatre.
If Anything Goes were a jukebox musical composed of nothing but the songs of Cole Porter – “Anything Goes,” “You’re The Top,” “I Get A Kick Out Of You,” “It’s De-Lovely,” “Friendship” – it would be a pleasant couple hours of tuneful nostalgia. But the book, in spite of the considerable talents of P.G. Wodehouse, Guy Bolton, Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, is as hackneyed as discarded vaudeville skits. The large Welk cast directed by Ray Limon does its best to inhabit all the overdrawn characters, but the on-stage antics, mugging and rim-shot double entendres are so relentless that the production quickly becomes a real wristwatch-checker. Most of the characters are saddled with cartoon characterizations, but they proceed gamely in spite of it. Josh Carr and Rachel Davis portray shipboard lovers Billy and Hope, but the signature performance is delivered by Natalie Nucci in the show’s highest profile role, one made famous on Broadway by Ethel Merman. Nucci’s evangelist/cabaret singer Reno Sweeney is smart, sassy and sexy. She handles Anything Goes’ comedy with just the right wink-wink attitude, and her singing, while not Merman-esque, is still de-lovely. When the shipboard stage is crowded – and it often is – Nucci’s the one you’re watching. Anything certainly goes with Shaun Leslie Thomas’ turn as gangster Moonface Martin and RC Sands’ veddy British Lord Evelyn Oakleigh. We’re talking free-for-all time. At least they, like the ensemble as a whole, can dance. Director Limon’s choreography shines most at the end of Act 1, which closes with a fancy-stepping rendition of the show’s title tune. It’s no bulletin that Billy and Hope end up together at the end, though the Chinese men-in-disguise gambit that makes it happen is nearly as squirm-worthy as Mickey Rooney’s Mr. Yunioshi in “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.” Cultural insensitivity-induced laughter? Hey, anything goes.
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Marie, an ex-convict living in London, is free. Or is she? The question permeates the stale air of Marie’s glum studio flat, an untidy bedsit where the opened sofa bed is unmade and strewn with wrinkled clothing, the television set sits on the floor and the volume doesn’t work, and loneliness is as constant as the rain strafing the window. Marie is slumped in a chair, staring lifelessly down at the flickering images of her TV set, when someone knocks on her door. When she opens it to find her former cellmate, Lorraine, herself just recently released from prison, she has no idea what revelations are to come, about Lorraine and about herself.
As a two-character study, Chloe Moss’ “This Wide Night,” making its regional premiere at ion theatre in Hillcrest under the direction of Claudio Raygoza, is intense and slow-burning. Yolanda Franklin as the older, hapless Lorraine and Rhianna Basore as the relentlessly sad and secretive Marie bear the weight of this play’s ponderous inquiries into self-esteem and life inside and outside of the “big house,” and do so for 90 uninterrupted moments. Marie has a home, if you want to call it one, and a job in a pub (or so we’re led to believe) and seemingly some grasp of her new life, post-incarceration, even if she appears catatonic in her coping. Lorraine is without a home and without a clue about survival, gulping pills that she swears she plans to wean herself off of, and longing for connection: to Marie, to the 31-year-old son taken away from her as a child, to reality. Both actors manage credible British accents, especially Basore, who also navigates the entire one-act play without anything more than a microscopic smile. Marie is as inwardly tortured – until, late in the going, she makes an angry confession that we saw coming -- as Lorraine is emotionally out there. She cracks wise, she snores up a storm, she feigns bravery in a world beyond prison walls that terrifies her more than what she left behind. The complexities of Basore’s and Franklin’s performances are more impressive than Moss’ play itself, which besides its glacial pace rarely unfolds in an atmosphere anything other than grim. There’s a light moment when Marie breaks out a CD that we’re told was one of Lorraine’s favorites while in prison, and she goads her visitor into trying to dance. This ends, of course, with Lorraine throwing up on the floor. When Marie staggers home “from work,” bloody and bruised and carrying a greasy bag of English chips and gravy, and then tries to eat some, it’s a wonder she doesn’t throw up herself. We get it. Freedom isn’t all it’s cracked up to be if you’re not free in your soul. It’s not a novel or earth-shaking comment, and in “This Wide Night” it’s hard to be hopeful for these two women. We want to be. They care about each other on either side of the iron bars. We just want, as they do, a glimmer of hope. Overheard amid the pre-show mingling at Moonlight Amphitheatre about 20 minutes before curtain time: “I like this show because you don’t have to think about it.” From that timely comment, we can presume the following: This patron, like many in the audience, had seen Monty Python’s Spamalot before. Second, this wacky musical-comedy based on the film “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” isn’t thought to be complex material. But here this big mouth was wrong: While many of the gags – both verbal and physical – in Spamalot are no-brainers, the show (book and lyrics by Python Eric Idle, music by John Du Prez and Idle) is rife with wry and subtle nuggets that require if not a sophisticated mind then at least one in tune with the zany Monty Python sensibility.
Spamalot was in town just last year, making its regional debut at the Welk Resorts Theatre (there was a national touring production at the Civic a couple of years before that), but Moonlight’s production is bigger, more lavish and more Vegas. In the Act One scene “Camelot,” the setting is sheer Sin City, complete with scantily clad dancers and giant roulette wheel suspended from the rafters. Moonlight’s Spamelot also benefits from a straight-faced, exasperated King Arthur, beautifully played by Sean Murray, who’s also artistic director of Cygnet Theatre in Old Town. Returning to Moonlight after a much tamer performance in last year’s production of Young Frankenstein is Larry Raben, who is three times as funny here in the role of Knight of the Round Table Sir Robin. Most of the scenes, like the show itself, are deliberately ridiculous. There are so many puns and dolllops of distinctly British humor that no one could keep track of them all, But even if this is your third or even fourth experience with the craziness, you’re bound to enjoy not only the familiar nonsensical songs, but the costumes and set designs of Tim Hatley (provided by Musical Theatre West), the “Laker Girls” who accompany The Lake of the Lake (Christine Hewitt) during her first number and the irreverent spoof of the Great White Way, “You Won’t Succeed on Broadway.” Tossed-in references to Vista and deposed ex-mayor Bob Filner don’t hurt either. Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, the notorious “thrill killers” of 1924, got their thrills not only from a series of crimes that culminated with the murder of a 13-year-old boy, but from each other’s bodies. This point, while downplayed in Leopold and Loeb dramatizations over the years (including Alfred Hitchcock’s 1948 film “Rope”), is made abundantly clear in Stephen Dolginoff’s one-act musical Thrill Me: The Leopold & Loeb Story, now on stage at Diversionary Theatre in University Heights. The physicality of their relationship fueled the physicality of Leopold and Loeb’s kidnapping and murder of young Bobby Franks. As portrayed in Thrill Me, the two privileged University of Chicago law students hungered for each other and hungered to commit the perfect crime.
Thrill Me is a fast-moving, artfully staged character portrait of the two thrill killers. The lean, glowering Loeb (Scott Nickley) appears to be the mastermind and chief manipulator, but as the story unfolds, we learn that bespectacled Leopold (Michael Parrot) is not the neurotic dupe he seems to be. Under the direction of Bret Young, Nickley and Parrot inhabit the mostly prop-less stage with a brooding, desperate energy. Neither is a particularly impressive singer, but the show’s score really doesn’t call for any vocal theatrics, and the solo-piano accompaniment makes the proceedings almost a dark cabaret. As grim as the subject matter is, Thrill Me comes with its share of one-liners, and often laughter rang from the audience on opening night. Possibly we laugh at what scares us, and these were two seriously scary dudes. As to Dolginoff’s score, the title song and the sinister “Superior” are standouts, but you don’t expect a show-stopper in Thrill Me and you don’t get one. Notable in this production is the choreography of Michael Mizerany, who moves the actors across and around the small stage with the restless passion that must have resided in the dark souls of Leopold and Loeb. Historical footnote, and one that is addressed at the end of Thrill Me: Leopold and Loeb eventually got life plus 99 years for the boy’s murder. Leopold was eventually paroled in 1958. Loeb was killed by a fellow prisoner and never again tasted freedom. Try this just for fun: Ask the next 10 people you meet to explain the 2001 Enron scandal to you. Odds are most of them will say they’ve heard of Enron and they knew there was some scandal involving it, but that’d be it. Now try to imagine a work of theater based on the Enron scandal. That’s what British playwright Lucy Prebble did, and her resultant Enron played to audiences on both London’s West End and (for a month) on Broadway. Now Prebble’s story of greed, villainy and inter-corporate backstabbing is making its West Coast debut, at Moxie Theatre in Rolando. Jennifer Eve Thorn directs an energetic cast of 12 in a swiftly paced production that takes what is sheer documentary material and pumps it up with multimedia enhancements and characters costumed as crimson-eyed raptors and man-sized mice. The sight gags and hip-hop music and the fanciful moments where “Enron employees” break into dance provide theatricality, though it’s all rather gimmicky, like a series of Second City skits strung together.
Amid all the stage pranks are some stalwart satiric performances. Max Macke glories in the pivotal role of Enron kingpin Jeffrey Skilling, an arrogant, mercenary figure whose soul seems beyond redemption. Yet his unquestioned love for his daughter (shown asking her father innocent questions from behind a projection screen) humanizes Skilling to the point that we ALMOST feel sorry for him. The other sorta sympathetic character in Enron is the misfit Andy Fastow (Eddie Yaroch), whose brainstorm to create a “shadow company” to hide the corporate giant’s debts seduces Skilling and precipitates Enron’s downfall. Mark C. Petrich complements this threesome as the smug, oblivious Ken Lay (famously dubbed “Kenny Boy” by Dubya). Strictly speaking, the Enron scandal was about numbers –the kind that follow dollar signs. But it’s important to remember that it was really about people – those swallowed up by greed and those who because of the greedy lost their life savings. Prebble’s Enron carries that message with conviction and has some fun along the way. Nothing wrong with that. Laughter eases some of the pain. Now, if only Kenny Boy hadn’t croaked before serving even one day of his prison sentence. Those slamming doors you just heard are echoing from the direction of Old Town, where Cygnet Theatre is staging Sam Shepard’s 75 minutes of raw tension known as Fool for Love. If rodeo rowdy Eddie (Francis Gercke) isn’t slamming behind him the front door of a claustrophobic motel room in the Mojave Desert, then his volatile lover, May (Carla Harting) is slamming the motel bedroom door behind her. Eddie and May are a desperately co-dependent pair, and as the story unfolds it will turn out that’s the least of their issues.
Cygnet Artistic Director is calling the presentation in rotating repertory of two of Shepard’s imaginary plays, Fool for Love and True West, the theater’s “Shep Rep.” (True West will be reviewed next week.) Like another regional theater with a jones for Shepard (Carlsbad’s New Village Arts has in recent seasons staged both Simpatico and Buried Child), Cygnet is embracing the playwright’s dark, simmering leitmotifs, with their frayed families and frequent shots of booze and violence. Fool for Love is archetypical. While Eddie and May do their metaphorical dance of self-destruction, the spectral presence of their father (Antonio TJ Johnson) looms in a rocking chair in the corner. The Old Man IS their old man, and each can hear him independent of the other when he speaks. Trouble is, they have two different mothers, meaning that lovers Eddie and May are half-siblings. Each tells the truth as he or she sees it to Martin (Manny Fernandes), an innocent good guy who arrives to pick up May for a night at the movies. Fool for Love’s unseen antagonist is The Countess, whom Eddie evidently has been diddling, and who decides to exact revenge in the parking lot – and you thought slamming doors was loud. Gercke and Harting are worthy adversaries, alternately pathetic and explosive. Gercke’s finest moment may be how believably he brings off Eddie’s having been kneed in the groin by May – in the middle of a kiss. Talk about pain in your Mojave Desert. Murray’s direction ramps up the mystery and the anxiety, and Fool for Love’s silences are so thoughtfully timed that each eruption, slamming door or otherwise, jolts you in the shoulders. Passion becomes obsession very quickly in the latest at ion theatre, and when it does, it’s scary. Not “Fatal Attraction” scary, but the kind of discomfiture that preys upon you in the darkness. The show is Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine’s Passion, which opened on Broadway almost exactly 20 years ago and is only now making its San Diego debut. Even though Passion won the Tony for Best Musical, it’s understandable why it ran less than a year on Broadway. Though the story, set in Italy during a time of war in the late 19th century, is to some degree a standard-issue love-triangle melodrama, it is chockfull of unsettling desperation. Whatever romance is conveyed in the very opening moments – a tryst between soldier Giorgio (Jason Heil) and his married mistress (Katie Whalley) – is forgotten almost from the instant that sickly Fosca (Sandy Campbell) makes her needy presence felt. That’s when the obsession begins, and as the tale unfolds, her obsession becomes Giorgio’s as well.
Ion Theatre has proven itself with dark musicals before – last year’s production of Grey Gardens was one of the year’s best. Sondheim’s operatic score is earnestly rendered by Passion’s large cast, under the direction of Kim Strassburger. (Piano accompaniment is provided by Mark Danisovszky.) Making her ion debut, Campbell has the meatiest role, and Fosca seems a strangely haunting bookend to another part Campbell played earlier this year, Lady Macbeth at Intrepid Shakespeare. Fosca’s is a different shade of madness, though Lapine’s narrative questions whether her condition is really starvation for love. Giorgio’s transfer of passion from his mistress Clara to Fosca is troubling but inevitable, and Heil is as steady in the role as his wide-eyed character is unsteady. Memorable among the ensemble is Ruff Yeager as Giorgio’s colonel, and Bryan Banville in dual roles as a soldier and the unscrupulous Ludovic, Fosca’s husband in a flashback. The production is a wearying hour and 45 minutes without intermission, and the love, or obsession, triangle does unfold more slowly than it should. But take note of the Giorgio we see when the play opens and the one on stage at the end. The price of passion will be all too clear. The Globe’s The Two Gentlemen of Verona, capping off its 2014 Summer Shakespeare Festival, is a triumph of al fresco fun. The production directed by Mark Lamos on the open-air Lowell Davies Festival stage is a 95-minute-long (with no intermission) joyride that never lags. Measured against the Globe’s earlier summer Shakespeare offering, Othello, it is pure fluff, of course. But you’d have to be a complete curmudgeon not to enjoy this beguiling comedy. It’s got it all: bright, meticulous Renaissance costumes by Linda Cho, John Arnone’s elevated scenery, modeled after oil paintings and frescoes from the Italian Renaissance period, and a spirited cast that is having as good a time as the audience. There’s even a crowd-pleasing (and very capably performing) dog that gets deserved stage time, a lab/German Shorthaired Pointer mix who plays Crab with soulful eyes and wagging tail.
Adam Kantor and Hubert Point-Du Jour are Proteus and Valentine, the two gentlemen – and best friends – around home Shakespeare’s romp about love, betrayal and forgiveness revolves. Kantor has the more expressive role, as the fickle and scheming Proteus, though he’s upstaged when paired with the gifted comedienne Kristin Villanueva, playing Julia, Proteus supposed true love. Supposed because he instantly falls in love at the sight of Valentine’s heartthrob, the stunning and dignified Silvia (Britney Coleman). Some may wonder why Valentine, noble that he is, would so easily forgive his unfaithful pal Valentine by story’s end, but he is, remember, a gentlemen with all the decorum that connotes. Besides that, it’s a comedy, so lighten up. In between the courtships and romantic wooing are the droll musings of Proteus’ servant Launce (Richard Ruiz), who is accompanied by the aforementioned canine, Crab, and often by Valentine’s wacky servant Speed (Rusty Ross). As if all that isn’t enough, when Valentine is banished midway through the action by Silvia’s father, the Duke (Mark Pinter), he is recruited by a band of Robin Hood-like outlaws wielding bows and arrows. Throw in some original music (by Fitz Patton) and the requisite festive dancing and you’ve got summertime Shakespeare as charming as it can be. You think things got out of control when Nick and Honey came to visit George and Martha in Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Try Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit on for size. When Ben and Mary make the acquaintance of Kenny and Sharon, the roof gets razed. Actually, burned to a crisp, if you’ll pardon a spoiler alert.
D’Amour’s hectic play about the effects of economic desperation on a big city’s (Detroit is never specified in spite of the play’s title) suburbs makes the case that while there’s a lot to be said for neighbors, there’s also a lot to be said against them. Out of work Ben (Steve Gunderson) and alcoholic-in-training Mary (Lisel Gorell-Getz) admit they’re friendless. So when they notice that the house next door, previously believed vacant, seems to have life stirring within it, they invite the new neighbors over for a cookout. (Grilling is a motif in this production, right up until the granddaddy of all grill jobs at the end – spoiler alert blown again.) Kenny (Jeffrey Jones) and Sharon (Summer Spiro) are, how to put this delicately? Oh, what the hell: white trash. They’re recovering addicts, too, but they’re affable and Sharon has the kind of wild abandon about her that repressed Ben and Mary crave. Not surprisingly, the next-door friendship soon goes haywire. In this San Diego Rep production directed by Sam Woodhouse, Detroit is played largely for laughs. There are a couple of bloody accidents, one vomiting sequence, many moments of Sharon running amok, and an overlong Act 2 backyard rap with each character indulging his or her trashiest instincts. A slow, reflective denouement in which old man Frank (Robert Benedetti) walks around with a cane and tries to fill in all the unplugged metaphors feels contrived. The actors are tireless, especially live-wire Spiro, who fills the Lyecum Space with manic energy. Gunderson is almost as winning as Ben, but in a quietly comical turn. The fire at the end of the show, however (final spoiler alert blown) is Detroit’s emotional high point. More extended sketch comedy than wholly realized dramedy, Detroit is, in backyard BBQ parlance, a might overcooked. Pass the beer. If you’ve never experienced Cabaret in person – in other words, your only reference point is the 1972 movie – then you really haven’t experienced Cabaret at all. Entertaining as the film is, it departed substantially from the original theatrical book by Christopher Isherwood. The splendid songs of John Kander and Fred Ebb survived, like “Maybe This Time,” “Money” and the show’s iconic title tune. But the darkness of the story, the rise of the Nazis in pre-World War II Berlin, took a back seat in the film to the showmanship of Liza Minnelli and Joel Grey.
The Welk Resort Theatre in Escondido, which is staging Cabaret through July 26, makes sure audiences are aware of the difference before the curtain goes up. A note from director Joshua Carr in the program reminds patrons that what they’re about to see is not, in the words of Hal Prince (director of the original Broadway production) the “soft-centered” version. It was apparent from uncertain applause and occasional gasps on opening night that quite a few in the crowd knew Cabaret only from the movie, which was directed by Bob Fosse. In this production, Carr and his unflagging cast do right by Cabaret the way it was meant to be, dancing and clowning when appropriate but not prettifying the story’s ugliness. Ashlee Espinosa and Eric Hellmers are solid as Kit Kat Klub singer Sally Bowles and the American writer she falls for (and vice versa), though they lack chemistry as a pair. The relationship never feels that serious. In the scene-stealing role of the Emcee, Jeffrey Scott Parsons flirts with going over the top in both German accent and mannerisms, but his is a role where over the top is almost expected. In the secondary roles of boarding house owner Fraulein Schneider and her German Jewish suitor Herr Schultz, Susan E.V. Boland and David Allen Jones strike the production’s most tender chords. At the Welk, their future and the forces that prove obstacles to it elicit more compassion than the young couple’s plight. When fate, stamped with a swastika, takes a hand in the play’s powerful second act, everyone in the cast rises to the occasion, especially Espinosa with her ironic rendering of “Life is a cabaret, old chum.” It sure as hell wasn’t a cabaret back then. Far from it. |
AuthorDavid L. Coddon is a Southern California theater critic. Archives
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